“Every person we have ever known, every place we have ever seen, everything that has ever happened to us – it all lives and breathes deep within us somewhere whether we like it or not, and sometimes it doesn’t take much to bring it back to the surface in bits and pieces.”
These words, written by novelist and spiritual writer Frederick Buechner, ring true in me and, I suspect, in many other people as well. We are truly a reservoir of more experiences than we can count. By the time we have reached adulthood, thousands of them have registered on our psyches, leaving traces that enrich our lives.
If you have already arrived to at least the beginnings of old age, by this time you have accumulated even more of these experiences, more than you can imagine. They form a vast storehouse of happenings from which you can draw for the sake of reminiscence and for other purposes. Of course, some lie too deep for recall except, sometimes, under extraordinary circumstances.
My own earliest memories of people tend toward my maternal grandmother. She was the first significant old person in my life, though probably, with a child’s eye, I made her much older than she really was. She seemed to me the embodiment of kindness and love, as she spoiled me with affection, cookies and late bedtimes.
Two specific images stand out: Grandmother Barry sitting peacefully in her rocking chair by the window reading her daily prayers out of a small book; and sending me down the front stairs to the porch to pick up the Salem (MA) Evening News, and asking me when I returned upstairs, “Who’s dead?”
This question at first seemed a bit morbid to me but I later came to see it as an expression of deep interest in the other people of her own time and place. Other impressions have stayed with me: my grandmother’s keeping the temperature in her house boiling hot; her taste in radio programs such as “Major Bowes’ Amateur Hour” and “Mr. Keen: Tracer of Lost Persons;” her monthly walks to Peabody Square to collect rents from sometimes foot-dragging tenants, – these and many other memories of this beloved person in my early life continue to be readily available.
About one of the places where I once lived as an adult, I have more complicated memories. St. Beuno’s College, near the town of St. Asaph in northern Wales, boasted a beautiful setting. Mt. Snowdon loomed in the far distant west; the Irish Sea could be discerned miles to the north, and the river Clywd lay almost at my feet. Images of this place have stayed vivid in my head over the decades since I left Wales.
These images of natural beauty, however, remain troubled by memories of feeling cut off from home and from friends. It proved the longest year of my life, largely because of this oppressive sense of isolation. I also came to reject many of the values held by my teachers there, and the discipline they imposed on my colleagues and me.
Among the valued happenings in my life that have remained most readily accessible, the birth of my daughter easily finishes first. It was an event that provoked in me emotions that normally do not go together. Feeling intense joy and yet pity and fear at the same time was something new in my experience and this set of feelings continues its imprint on my soul. This birth has left me with ongoing motive for wonder at the mystery of human life and thanksgiving for having been given a daughter to cherish.
Birth, of course, is a gift that goes on giving as the infant becomes a child and, in time, an adult. Looking back at the beginning of it all, I still feel awe at the birth and the later growth and development.
Persons, places, events – we all have them and, brought back, they have power to nourish our spirit. Though often mixed with painful elements, these parts of our past offer a rich agenda for spiritual reflection. I find myself returning often to the three sets of memories in my life noted here and find in them part of who I have become. They seem to me filled with meaning relevant to my ongoing quest for light and fulfillment.
Richard Griffin